Not for Public Display: Backstage at the American Museum of Natural History

NEW YORK CITY — You could spend three or four days in the American Museum of Natural History and still not see all the dinosaur fossils, meteorites, butterflies, lizards, diamonds and historical artifacts it has to offer. But even if you could, you would only have seen one face of the museum. In the basement, attic, turrets, back hallways and closets there’s an equally dizzying array of awesome stuff.

Wired Science recently took a tour of the museum-behind-the-museum to learn about the science, art, construction and collection that make up the heart of the 140-year-old institution. From cutting-edge cryogenic tissue storage to decades-old, handmade, fossil-preparation equipment to the Big Bone Room, we learned how the museum helps discover, advance and preserve the knowledge it is best known for putting on display.

Frozen Tissue Laboratory

Getting to the various labs and back rooms of the museum involves navigating a confusing agglomeration of large spaces lined with tall cabinets containing all manner of beetle, bird and badger specimens; riding in oversized elevators; and walking down long, cluttered hallways with exposed pipes and a strange mix of outdated, faded science and safety posters on the walls. So entering the sterile, spare, high-tech frozen-tissue laboratory is like stepping into another world.

The Ambrose Monell Cryo Collection consists of eight nearly indestructible liquid-nitrogen–fueled cryogenic tanks. Three are already online, preserving 70,000 tissue samples from reptiles, amphibians, mammals, insects, fish and birds. The space can fit four more vats, and at full capacity could store and catalog a million samples.

“We have all taxa. It’s one of the things that makes this collection unique,” said Julie Feinstein, collections manager for the tissue lab. “All of the collections from the museum have samples here.”

The cryovats take the place of the many individual collections that used to be kept in freezers in labs all over the museum. Those samples were vulnerable to power outages and even when they managed to stay frozen, they were kept between minus 4 and minus 112 Fahrenheit, which is not cold enough to prevent all damage and degradation over time. The bottom of the vats are filled with liquid nitrogen that is below minus 300, always keeping the tissue colder than minus 230.

“And the freezers don’t fail,” Feinstein said. Even in the event of a catastrophic power failure, the vats will stay cold for five weeks on their own. And they are on wheels, so the samples can be moved without taking them out of the freezers. There’s also a dedicated staff just for the frozen collection. “So the freezers are not alone.”

The tissue library is also protected against loss and misplacement by a meticulous computer tracking system that involves bar codes and human-readable numbers.

The cryostorage supports the museum’s genetic-analysis and conservation studies, but the lab will store samples for any scientist with a need who is willing to relinquish ownership and share. The types of samples range from mammal blood to bird liver to whale skin. The lab recently received some samples of bats with White Nose syndrome, which threatens bat populations in the eastern United States, and is already receiving requests from other researchers to study them.

It is the premier tissue storage facility in the world, and the Smithsonian, Harvard and Yale natural history museums are hoping to model their own collections after it, Feinstein said.

Meteorite Research

The American Museum of Natural History is known for the biggest chunk of meteorite on display in any museum: The Ahnighito meteorite weighs 34 tons and requires extra reinforcements in the basement to hold it up. But the museum’s geologists are busy studying bits of meteorites that are even more interesting, at least scientifically.

“We like to look at oddball meteorites that are different or strange and might tell us something new,” said geologist Denton Ebel (below), curator of the Arthur Ross Hall of Meteorites.

Though Ebel claimed to have just five minutes to spare because he needed to work on an abstract for submission to the upcoming Meeting of the Meteoritical Society in New York, once he got started talking about meteorites, he forgot all about the deadline.

Ebel’s team is working on 3-D imaging of meteorites, which will soon get a boost from a new CAT scan that will soon be arriving at the museum. He’s also building a library of the infrared spectra (.pdf) of various astrophysically important minerals. This will help astronomers interpret data from the Herschel Space Observatory by comparing the infrared wavelengths emitted by planetary nebulae, supernova remnants, interplanetary dust and circumstellar disks to the spectra recorded in the lab and cataloged in the library.

The Big Bone Room

When a technician at the lab casually mentioned a place called the Big Bone Room, we knew we had to go there. And we were right. This room lives up to its name. Despite the many, many bones visitors can see at the museum, only 0.02 percent are actually on display. The rest are scattered throughout the back rooms and labs of the museum, but all the really big ones are in the Big Bone Room.

The room is like a library of huge fossils, complete with rolling stacks full of shelves of dinosaur bones. And though most of these fossils will never be seen by the public, many of them will be seen by scientists, both from the museum and from other institutions. Many of them were collected in the late 19th century.

“They’re waiting for the next wave of people who are interested in them,” said Carl Mehling, collections manager for the Big Bone Room. “Qualified scientists from anywhere can say, ‘Can I come play with your dinosaurs and write some stuff?’ And we let them in and hope they don’t break anything.”

Mehling clearly loves the fossils and is very happy to show them off, but he’s also very protective of the fragile specimens.

“Part of me wants to brick the door shut and never let anyone in here,” he said. “But the science has to happen.”

Below: 1) The biggest bone in the Big Bone room is the femur of a camarasaurus, and looks to be close to 5 feet long.

2) Some of the prize fossils in the collection are type specimens, the very first of their kind to be described in the scientific literature, such as this Anchiceratops, which was on display in the museum at one time.

3) This dinosaur was probably buried alive in a landslide that caught it off guard.

Exhibit Workshop

At the top of the museum a team of artists and other creative types build the exhibits in a big room filled with tools, paint and the remnants of previous projects. The museum employs 12 permanent artists.

When we visited, an exhibit about the race between Roald Amundsen and Robert F. Scott to be first to the South Pole in 1912, called The Race to the End of the Earth, was just being finished. Most of the painstakingly built models, including replicas of Scott’s cabin and Amundsen’s ice-cave workshop, had been moved to the exhibit space, except for a few stray Emperor penguins.

Out on the museum floor, behind construction barriers, a beautifully lifelike leopard seal was being carefully hung from the ceiling with the help of a mechanical lift.

Fossil Doctors

The museum’s fossil-preparation lab is one of the largest in the world. Specimens from all over the world come in, still encased in the rock or mud where they were found, and it’s the job of the fossil preparators to get the skulls, femurs and teeth out.

Depending on the type of rock, this can be an incredibly difficult and exacting process. In the case of a hard rock matrix, Ana Balcarel uses a minidrill called an air scribe that resembles the tools dentists use to drill a cavity. The trick is to drill out the rock without harming the prize inside.

“When I started, it used to take me months to prepare a single specimen,” said Balcarel, who has worked in the lab for nine years. “But now I am more comfortable with my tools, and I can do one in a couple weeks.”

Even with skills honed by years of practice, the occasional tiny bit of a fossil will break off and end up on the floor, where it can hide out in the dust. And when it comes to identifying and studying a new species, every little sliver of tooth and bone is critical.

“It’s not rare to find somebody on all fours sweeping the up the dust and hoping to find that piece,” she said. “I’ve spent days on all fours.”

Most of the specimens are not destined to be displayed, but will be used for research. The prep lab is also responsible for making casts of some of the fossils, which will be sent out to scientists. The casts are made using an odd collection of old and new instruments and ovens, including an old handmade centrifuge built on stray specimen drawers (above), used to get air bubbles out of the casts.

Because fossil preparation is so tough, and each individual specimen requires a considerable amount of labor, the museum has thousands of fossils collected by its scientists over the last century that are still encased in rock and wrapped with plaster casts in the boxes they arrived in.

Ammonite Clues

Nearly every available surface in paleontologist Neil Landman’s office is covered with trays of ammonite fossils. Related to the pearly nautilus, these spiral-shelled marine creatures went extinct along with the dinosaurs around 65 million years ago.

Landman’s interest in ammonites has to do with the material in their aragonite shells known as nacre. By analyzing ratios of isotopes –- variations of the same element with a different mass — he can learn things about the environment they lived in, such as temperature and salinity.

But nacre can break down over time, depending on an ammonite fossil’s age and history.

“In 100 million years, a lot can happen,” Landman said.

Only relatively pristine material has the goods Landman is after, so his team uses a scanning electron microscope (below), which utilizes a beam of electrons to image surfaces, to find the best nacre. Under the microscope, the stuff they’re after looks like a clean, structurally sound brick wall. If the wall looks ratty or crumbly, it’s no good.

In Every Corner

As exciting as the labs, research and exhibits at the museum are, it’s the odd corners, hallways, wall posters and stacks of stuff that give the museum’s backstage its character.

Everywhere we went, we passed intriguing doors with signs like “Invertebrate Storage. Do Not Block”; cabinets full of drawers of who knows what natural treasures; both new and old scientific posters about everything from rhinos to diamonds to space missions; huge, wall-mounted, decades-old photographs of fossil hunting missions; statues of scientific icons like Copernicus; and wall paintings of African ungulates.

In a corner of the Big Bone Room, a relatively fresh-looking plaster cast marked “Skull” sat in front of old photos of museum staff handling similar fossils.

Every one of these things made us want to stop, open doors, ask questions and hang around the museum for days.

Fossil Hunter

Mark Norell has a pretty sweet gig. He’s head of the museum’s paleontology department, has a huge round office that occupies one of the museum’s turrets, and he hunts for fossils in exotic places like Mongolia where he eats gourmet meals — such as sushi made with irradiated, vacuum-packed eel — in the middle of the Gobi desert.

“Our camps have a certain style,” Norell said.

He also gets to curate exhibits about things that interest him, like the current Traveling the Silk Road exhibit. He recently wrote a book about Barnum Brown, a fossil hunter for the AMNH who discovered the Tyrannosaurus rex, wore a beaver-skin coat in the field, had numerous romantic affairs and also worked as a spy.

The research Norell and his grad students do is exciting as well, such as using CT scanning of dinosaur skulls to see what their brains looked like, and comparing that to bird brains to understand where different sensory processing happens.

Tour of the Universe

After the museum closed, we were treated to a private tour of the universe from the curved rows of plush seats in the museum’s Hayden Planetarium, piloted by Brian Abbot and Carter Emmart (above), while a pilot-in-training looked on, waiting her turn to practice.

The amount of information (some of it real-time data acquired from satellites and spacecraft) incorporated into the planetarium’s digital universe is staggering. We sailed through layer after layer of stars, exoplanets and galaxies until we reached the edge of the known universe, represented by a map of the cosmic background microwave radiation.

Describing the whole awesome trip we took — and it did feel like a trip — would inevitably fall short of the experience, but you can get a taste in “The Known Universe” video. Or fly through the universe on your own computer by downloading the Digital Universe Atlas.

Behind the high-tech planetarium dome are rooms of computers and servers that run the show, as well as piles of wires, boxes of tools and equipment, and an old projector that has been replaced by newer models but is kept around for spare parts.